Author Archives: Martijn Van Exel

OpenStreetMap receives $25,000 Grant from American Red Cross

The OpenStreetMap Foundation is very excited to announce that the American Red Cross extended OSMF an USD 25,000 grant for purchasing hardware to support the ongoing resilience of the OSM platform infrastructure. The funds were allocated towards the purchase and provisioning of a ‘hot’ backup database failover server – which has been purchased and is currently humming along doing its important job! This trail-blazing contribution will ensure that we can recover from site failures quickly and with the minimum amount of disruption for those editing the map. This is a big step forward in platform resiliency that we otherwise would not have been able to make at this time.

American Red Cross and OpenStreetMap

The American Red Cross has steadily ramped up its support for OpenStreetMap. Indentifying OSM as a source of up-to-date map data crucial to their international disaster field operations, they quickly developed into a major contributor to OSM, through their own work, support of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), and most recently through their Missing Maps initiative, to which around 10% of all OSM map contributions can now be attributed. The American Red Cross has also supported OpenStreetMap through app development and sponsorship of State of the Map conferences.

If you are interested in the technical specifications of this new server, please see here.

We want to say a big Thank You to the American Red Cross and we hope that more organisations which use OSM data will be inspired to strengthen the OSMF infrastructure and support our great project! If you are interested in donating to the OpenStreetMap Foundation, please get in touch with us at board@osmfoundation.org.

About The OpenStreetMap Foundation

The OpenStreetMap Foundation is a not-for-profit organization, formed in the UK to support the OpenStreetMap Project. It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data and to providing geospatial data for anyone to use and share. The OpenStreetMap Foundation owns and maintains the infrastructure of the OpenStreetMap project. You can support OpenStreetMap by becoming a member, donating or joining our volunteer Working Groups.

About the American Red Cross

The American Red Cross shelters, feeds and provides emotional support to victims of disasters in the US; teaches skills that save lives; provides international humanitarian aid; and supports military members and their families. In 2017 alone, the American Red Cross sent humanitarian aid to 26 countries to help save lives in the aftermath of disasters. The Red Cross is a not-for-profit organization that depends on volunteers and the generosity of the American public to perform its mission. Visit redcross.org/international of more information.

We reached our €70,000 goal. Thank you!

Today, we are grateful, happy and excited to announce that we have reached the goal of €70,000 for our 2016 donation drive! The purpose of this year’s drive – for the OpenStreetMap project to secure its independence and financial security – clearly resonated with you as strongly as it does with us. The continued existence of OpenStreetMap as an independent source of free and open data is priceless, but money is needed to secure it nonetheless. With this €70,000, we will be able to continue maintaining our infrastructure and fund our very modest operational budget.

donate-goal-reached

We would like to thank all 1900+ individual donors, as well as Mapbox, who helped us push this drive over the finish line with a €10,000 matching donation.

If you have not donated yet, you can still do so at donate.openstreetmap.org. Please know that donations in any amount are very welcome throughout the year!

Thank you!

Donate today to support OpenStreetMap!

At State of the Map, which is about to kick off in Brussels, Belgium, we will be officially launching this year’s OpenStreetMap donation drive! This time around, we are raising money with a most important goal: our continued independence as a project.

OpenStreetMap is the largest open geographic database in the world, the data infrastructure for multitudes of mapping projects around the globe. OpenStreetMap data is, and will always be, free to use. Your donation to the OpenStreetMap Foundation will cover our core operational expenses in supporting the OpenStreetMap project: hardware costs, legal fees, administrative assistant and other expenses of our working groups and administration.

We currently run extremely lean for an operation for a project the size and importance of OpenStreetMap. The OpenStreetMap Foundation relies on revenue from individual and corporate membership dues, profits generated by the annual State of the Map conferences, and past donation drives (thank you so much for the support last year — GBP 60,000 for updating our server infrastructure). We must keep our income sources diversified, as these vary from year to year, but our modest needs stay the same. For this, we need your support.

Thank you for considering donating to OpenStreetMap! We are truly grateful for donations of any amount. Whether you can give €100 or €5, please know that your donation will go directly towards keeping OpenStreetMap strong, stable and independent. Thank you!